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Bitcoin: The Greatest Story Ever Sold

BITCOIN: THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD

“Sell the sizzle, not the steak.” – Oldest sales trick in the book

“Resistance is futile. You must assimilate” – The Borg

Once I discover what triggers or motivates a person, and then figure out how to activate it, I can sell anything. And it doesn’t even need to be a product or service they previously wanted.

Case in point….life insurance.

I sold life insurance for almost ten years and made a decent living while doing so. I never forced anything on anyone and quickly canceled the policy if they decided later it was not what they wanted.

Very few did. I had the second lowest lapse/cancel rate in my region.

You want the customer to decide on their own volition, and with minimal prompting on your part, that they want; no, they need what you are selling. Once this occurs, you are simply an order taker filling the expressed need(s) of the customer.

To do so you sell the sizzle, not the steak.

I wasn’t selling life insurance. I was solving a financial ‘problem’ everyone has, but often doesn’t recognize as a problem, is in denial of the problem or fears the problem is too big or expensive to solve.

I am not bragging, but rather pointing out something very few people consider. We are all heavily influenced by (psychological warfare) sales techniques deeply rooted in all sales pitches delivered by skilled practitioners. And the number one most powerful technique employed is to plant a seed that leverages the customer’s own emotional triggers.

Taken to the extreme level, once a person is triggered within carefully controlled and presented parameters, anything is possible.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Local Currencies

Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Knowledge without character
Commerce without morality
Science without humanity
Worship without sacrifice
Politics without principle

— given by Mohandas Gandhi to his grandson Arun shortly before his assassination

BITCOIN AND BLOCKCHAIN

The world is on fire lately with the exponential growth of Bitcoin and other electronic cryptocurrencies. While some see these as speculative bubbles that are tied to nothing, used on the dark web to ransom hacked computers, and profligate users of electricity, others see Bitcoin and its ilk as our liberation from nation states and their central banks. Both could be true. Perhaps more important is that the platform underpinning Bitcoin, called blockchain technology, and later advances such as Ethereum, have the potential to completely transform the way that the world operates.

Many people see the rise in Bitcoin as the result of a growing distrust in governments, official/artificial fiat currencies, corporations, institutions, and other people. If the thing that we now call money has no inherent or intrinsic value, and is controlled by people and institutions who do not have our best interests in mind, why not invest in an alternative?

Bitcoin is not the only alternative economic game in town, just the first to capture the global imagination. People have spent decades developing other ways of moving in the economy that do not leave the planet trashed and societies broken. This work goes under many different names: regenerative or steady-state economics, LETS systems, the solidarity economy, local living economies, local currencies, Time Trade and barter networks are just some of them. The intentions of each vary somewhat, but a common thread is to create social economic mechanisms that do not rely on debt, interest, inflation, exploitation, restricted access to capital, or continuous growth.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

EU To Restrict Movement of Cash

The EU is now developing strict rules for carrying cash when traveling to non-European countries and returning to Europe. The revision of the First Cash Control Regulation from 2005, which stipulated that EU citizens should register cash in excess of € 10,000 when leaving the EU or when returning to the customs authorities have to, is what is under review. They want to lower the number and include gold, gemstones, and cash debit cards.

Interestingly, cryptocurrencies are not to be regarded as cash. Why? They are not sure how to detect them. The EU explanation reads: “Despite the high risk emanating from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, these are not added to the cash. The reason for this is that the customs authorities lack the technical means to discover cryptocurrencies. “

The customs authorities can now seize any amount of cash less than € 10,000 if they suspect that the money is somehow involved in any criminal activity. This is authorizing the Civil Asset Forfeiture that has been so profitable to the United States. Hence, the EU does not clearly define what suspicion is required to classify as a possible criminal activity. That will be avoiding taxes.

The EU is also extending the new rules to any freight shipment involving cash. Already, one cannot send cash by mail. This is now freight shipments. A friend used the service where you can send your baggage ahead of you for a trip. He was called down and had to remove $2.75 cents that were in a suitcase headed back to London. So there is no amount too small.

The purpose of the rules is now openly being justified to fight against tax evasion, along with moonlighting and terror financing. The government clearly understands that cash is the only way for citizens to protect their savings from access by states and banks and any special levies or wealth taxes. Closing this door merely opens the door to cash investment turning to movable assets particularly shares.

Could Central Banks Dump Gold in Favor of Bitcoin?

Could Central Banks Dump Gold in Favor of Bitcoin?

All of which brings us to the “crazy” idea of backing fiat currencies with cryptocurrencies, an idea I first floated back in 2013, long before the current crypto-craze emerged.

Exhibit One: here’s your typical central bank, creating trillions of units of currency every year, backed by nothing but trust in the authority of the government, created at the whim of a handful of people in a room and distributed to their cronies, or at the behest of their cronies.

And this is a “trustworthy” currency?

Exhibit Two: central banks can’t become insolvent, we’re told, because they can create as much currency as they want, whenever they want. And this is a “trustworthy” currency?

Exhibit three: and here’s what happens when trust in the currency is lost due to excessive currency issuance: the currency goes from 10 to the US dollar to 5,000 to $1 and then to 95,000 to $1, on its way to 2,000,000 to $1:

Yes, this was once a “trustworthy” currency.

While many people expect China to issue a gold-backed currency some day, they overlook the inconvenient reality that China is creating far more fiat currency than it is adding in gold reserves. They also overlook that gold-backed means nothing if the currency isn’t convertible into gold.

If it isn’t convertible, it isn’t gold-backed. Claiming there’s gold somewhere in a vault doesn’t make a currency gold-backed, as the central bank can devalue the currency it issues at will. Gold-backed means the currency is pegged at X units of currency to 1 unit of gold, and X units of currency can be exchanged for 1 unit of gold.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Gold Guys View of Crypto, Bitcoin, and Blockchain

A Gold Guys View of Crypto, Bitcoin, and Blockchain

Bitcoin was on my radar far back as 2011, but for years, I didn’t think much of it.

It was a curiosity. Nothing more.

Sort of like the virtual money you use in World of Warcraft or something. In 2015, looking deeper, I slowly (not the sharpest tool in the shed) arrived at that “aha” inflection point that most advocates of honest money arrive at. I realized that a distributed public ledger has the power to change, well, everything.

Changing All The Things

One aspect of crypto that appealed to me was that this technology had the potential to bring “un-banked” people from around the world into the modern financial system. It potentially granted access to digital transactions without the use of banks for billions of people that were formerly excluded from transacting in the modern economy. People could be rewarded for their labor and have access to opportunities in ways which would not exist otherwise.

In places like Afghanistan, the local people do not go to their neighborhood super-mall to buy laptops and ipads. Much of the developing world has ever growing access to smart phones, with market penetration reaching into the billions. Developing countries are skipping the entire computer-laptop-tablet phase and moving straight into much more affordable smart/feature devices with internet access. In the Middle East and Africa, nearly all internet users are on mobile devices. Combined with crypto, all of these devices making up the internet of things grants access to a new global financial paradigm that is potentially owned by the people themselves.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Doug Noland: There Will Be No Way Out When This Market Bubble Bursts

Doug Noland: There Will Be No Way Out When This Market Bubble Bursts

Financial assets will become toxic to hold

This week Doug Noland joins the podcast to discuss what he refers to as the “granddaddy of all bubbles”.

Noland, a 30-year market analyst and specialist in credit cycles, currently works at McAlvany Wealth Management and is well known for his prior 16-year stint helping manage the Prudent Bear Fund.

He certainly shares our views that prices in nearly every financial asset class have become remarkably distorted due to central bank intervention, first with Greenspan’s actions to backstop the markets in the late-1980’s, and more recently (and more egregiously) with the combined central banking cartel’s massive and sustained liquidity injections in the years following the Great Financial Crisis.

All of which has blown the biggest inter-connected set of asset price bubbles the world has ever seen.

Noland foresees tremendous losses as inevitable, as the central banks lose control of the monstrosity they have created:

This is the granddaddy of all bubbles. We are at the end a long cycle where the bubble has reached the heart of money and credit.

There will be no way out. We’re not going to get enough private credit growth to reflate things when this bubble bursts. It’s going to have to come from central bank credit; it’s going to have to come from sovereign debt.

When this bubble bursts, it will shock people how far the central banks will have to expand their balance sheet just to accommodate the deleveraging in the system. And they won’t really be able to add new liquidity to the market; they’re just going to allow the transfer of leveraged positions from the leveraged players onto the central bank balance sheets.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bitcoin vs Fiat Currency: Which Fails First?

Bitcoin vs Fiat Currency: Which Fails First?

What if bitcoin is a reflection of trust in the future value of fiat currencies?

I am struck by the mainstream confidence that bitcoin is a fraud/fad that will soon collapse, while central bank fiat currencies are presumed to be rock-solid and without risk. Those with supreme confidence in fiat currencies might want to look at a chart of Venezuela’s fiat currency, which has declined from 10 to the US dollar in 2012 to 5,000 to the USD earlier this year to a current value in December 2017 of between 90,000 and 100,000 to $1:

Exchange Rate in Venezuela:

On 1 December, the bolivar traded in the parallel market at 103,024 VED per USD, a stunning 59.9% depreciation from the same day last month.

Analysts participating in the LatinFocus Consensus Forecast expect the parallel dollar to remain under severe pressure next year. They project a non-official exchange rate of 2,069,486 VEF per USD by the end of 2018. In 2019, the panel sees the non-official exchange rate trading at 2,725,000 VEF per USD.

If this is your idea of rock solid, I’ll take my chances with bitcoin, which currently buys more than 1 billion bolivars. Of course “it can’t happen here,” which is precisely what the good people of Venezuela thought a decade ago.

Gordon Long and I discuss Fiat Currency Failure (The Results of Financialization – Part IV) in a new 31-minute video. The bottom line is that fiat currencies are debt-based claims on future profits, energy production and wages, claims that are expanding far faster than the real economy and the productivity of the real economy.

In effect, fiat currencies and debt are like inverted pyramids resting on a small base of actual collateral.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 5


Gustave Courbet Sunset on Lake Geneva 1876
Chapter 1 of this five-part series by Dr. D is here: Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 1

Chapter 2 is here: Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 2

Chapter 3 is here: Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 3

Chapter 4 is here: Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 4

Next up: all 5 chapters combined in one big essay.

Dr. D: Bitcoin can be stolen. Although “Bitcoin” can’t be hacked, it’s only software and has many vulnerabilities. If held on an exchange, you have legal and financial risk. If held at home, you could have a hard drive fail and lose your passwords. If it’s on a hardware fob like a Trezor, the circuits could fail. For a robust system, computers themselves are pretty fragile. You could write down your passwords on paper, and have a house fire. You could print out several copies, but if any of the copies are found, they have full access to your account and stolen without you knowing. You could have your passwords stolen by your family, or have a trojan take a screen or keystroke capture.

Hackers could find a vulnerability not in Bitcoin, but in Android or AppleOS, slowly load the virus on 10,000 devices, then steal 10,000 passwords and clear 10,000 accounts in an hour. There are so many things that can go wrong, not because of the software, but at the point where you interface with the software. Every vault has a door. The door is what makes a vault useful, but is also the vault’s weakness. This is no different than leaving blank checks around, losing your debit card, or leaving cash on your dashboard, but it’s not true that there are no drawbacks. However the risks are less obvious and more unfamiliar.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

If You Don’t Own Any Bitcoin, Read This

If You Don’t Own Any Bitcoin, Read This

This week it hit $19,000. What’s next?

Wow. Just….wow.

Bitcoin’s price has gone ‘beyond exponential’ this week. Just yesterday, as I started working on this article, it shot up 22% — from $14,000 to $17,000 (hitting an intraday high of over $19,000).

And that’s after a mind-blowing upwards rocket ride over the past several months.

I think it’s safe to say that the vicious melt-up in price over such a short timeframe has surpassed the expectations of even the starriest-eyed Bitcoin fanboys.

The whole world, especially the 99.99% of us that own zero cryptocurrency, is asking: What happens next? And, What should I do?

Is this insane trajectory going to continue for a lot longer? Do I need to get in now to avoid missing this once-in-lifetime fortune-making opportunity?

Or is this a classic bubble blow-off top? Is this the deadliest time to enter, right before the price implodes?

An Expert’s Take

I had the chance to ask these questions Wednesday to a long-time veteran in the digital currency space. We met at a gathering of online media ‘mavens’; this guy has published news and analysis on cryptocurrencies since 2011, for both investors and developers. He knows the space exceedingly well.

Unsurprisingly, he holds a lot of Bitcoin. I didn’t ask directly how much; but knowing that he was covering the space back when Bitcoin traded in the single-dollars range, my conservative mental math quickly concluded he’s probably worth more than most people I’ve met in my life.

So here what I learned during my chat with him:

  • He thinks the current price action is “nuts”: To his veteran eye, the current frenzy is a speculative mania and will end in a massive sell-off, resulting in huge losses for those buying in at these prices. He’s watched Bitcoin long enough to have seen it experience several 70%+ corrections. In his mind, this will simply be the latest one. And there will be more in the future, he predicts.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Expect Desperate and Insane Behavior From Government in 2018 – Part 3 (War)

Expect Desperate and Insane Behavior From Government in 2018 – Part 3 (War)

In the first two installments of this series, I discussed the potential for the U.S. federal government to make some spectacularly foolish moves against its own people in the realms of cannabis and Bitcoin. My basic assumption is that government tends to despise freedom, and that “leaders” of an empire in decline like the U.S. are particularly vulnerable to very bad decisions.

Government propagandists constantly instruct the public that they need to be fearful of their neighbors or some guy in a cave overseas (who they probably funded in the first place), when they themselves tend to be the most unethical, corrupt thieves of all. It’s a very clever scam.


If you want to ban Bitcoin because of money laundering, crime and violence, we should really ban government first.


With that in mind, today’s post will zero in on what I consider to be the greatest threat to world peace going into 2018. While I remain unsure as to what the U.S. government may attempt when it comes to cannabis and Bitcoin, I’m far more concerned about the prospects of Donald Trump entangling this nation in an escalating and increasingly disastrous conflict in the Middle East. The signs are everywhere, and it’s all becoming very obvious. In fact, I’ve probably written more articles on this topic than any other in 2017.

Rather than rehash everything I’ve already said, below are links to my October series on the matter:

Empire Destroying Wars Are Coming to America Under Trump – Part 1

Empire Destroying Wars Are Coming to America Under Trump – Part 2

Empire Destroying Wars Are Coming to America Under Trump – Part 3

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Warning: ‘They Need The Markets To Implode’ To Usher In Cashless System

Warning: ‘They Need The Markets To Implode’ To Usher In Cashless System

stockmarketcrash

Market analyst Lynette Zang predicts in the next market meltdown, “real estate, stocks, and bonds will all crash.” When asked when this will happen, Zang says, “Enjoy your Christmas,” but in 2018, all bets are off.

Greg Hunter interviewed Lynette Zang, Chief Market Strategist at ITMtrading.com, and her assessment of the 2018 economy is dire.  Zang predicts, “In 2018, I don’t think they can hold these things together. I think we will see a major market correction in 2018. When that happens, that will cause the derivative implosion. We have to feel a lot of pain. . . . I think we are going to go into hyperinflation, and I think we will start to see that in 2018 because I think we will see these markets implode. I think we will see QE4 (money printing) for sure. . . . We have QE right now propping it up, according to the Fed’s own documents.”

Zang says ever since the 2008 meltdown, the elite have just been buying time to set up a debt reset.

“I am 100% certain we are in the middle of a money standard shift.  Ultimately, they need the markets to implode. . . . In 2008, the debt based system broke.  It died, it was done.  The central banks, globally, put it on life support, and they have to create a new system.  In my opinion, they want us cashless, and they want everything in digital form.  They want to dematerialize wealth at least for the masses.  I am 100% certain that this Bitcoin craze, and all of this, is about getting people used to digital currencies.  So, when they shift us from the debt based system to the digital system, we are more comfortable with it and more familiar with it.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 1


Gustave Courbet The wave 1869
A while ago, I asked a regular commenter at the Automatic Earth, who goes by the moniker Dr. D, to try and write an article for us. Not long after, I received no less than 31 pages, and an even 12345 words. Way too long for today’s digital attention spans. We decided to split it into 5 chapters. After we work through those 5, we’ll post it as one piece as well. Dr. D, who insists on sticking with his nom de plume, picked his own topic, and it’s -fittingly- bitcoin. A topic about which one can cover a lot of ground in 12345 words.

Now, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t throw in my own two Satoshis: Dr. D claims that “..everyone has an equal opportunity to solve the next calculation..”, but while that may perhaps have been sort of true at the very start, it isn’t now. It’s not true for the computerless or computer-illiterate, for those too poor to afford the electricity required by bitcoin mining, and for various other -very large- groups of people.

The equal opportunity idea sounds nice, but I think bitcoin runs the risk of creating just another set of elites, while reinforcing existing elites, who can afford to either buy bitcoin at whatever price at some point in time, or spend large sums to build mining ‘installations’ in locations where electricity is cheap. And sure, there will be losers among elites too, but inequality itself will not change; only the faces of winners and losers will, while the world’s real losers will remain just that.

It’s nothing new of course, inequality is our society’s middle name, but maybe that is precisely the problem. Maybe bitcoin should have come with an inbuilt way to spread wealth, not just shift it around.

Then again, it may all just be a giant bubble. Or a bubble inside a bubble inside a bubble.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Expect Desperate and Insane Behavior From Government in 2018 – Part 2 (Bitcoin)

Expect Desperate and Insane Behavior From Government in 2018 – Part 2 (Bitcoin)

The financial crisis of 2008/09 was the most significant event to happen in my lifetime. That episode, coupled with the deeply unethical and corrupt response to it, led to a direct delegitimization of governments and institutions worldwide. It’s precisely this self-inflicted destruction of credibility which opened up the window for the birthing of a new monetary and financial system in the wake of Bitcoin’s emergence in early 2009.

Bitcoin is a system designed to be everything the status quo isn’t. Decentralized, transparent, permissionless, with a well-defined and restricted monetary supply curve. Given the backdrop upon which it emerged, it’s unsurprising that as more time passes, the more popular it becomes.

Humanity is desperate for a major reboot and an entirely different way of doing things. Bitcoin and other crypto assets offer exactly that opportunity in the realm of finance and money, thus capturing the imagination of millions of the most brilliant and passionate people around the world. Since the status quo stubbornly refused to reform and change the system after the financial crisis, humanity had no choice but to take charge and do it independently at the grassroots level.

One thing that’s become increasingly clear to me as I’ve added years and experiences to my life, is that governments, generally speaking, hate freedom. It’s why something as beneficial and benign as cannabis remains illegal throughout the world, and why people like Jeff Sessions still want to criminalize it even in states where the actual people living there voted to make it legal (see Part 1 of this series). While the fairytale we’re conditioned to believe tells us government exists to protect us and create an environment in which humans can thrive, the reality is quite clearly the opposite. The crooked response to the financial crisis demonstrated this in spades to anyone paying even the slightest amount of attention.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is Cryptocurrency a Government Plot?

QUESTION: You have said that the future will be cryptocurrencies. The Bank of Canada has come out and acknowledged what you have been saying that such private issue challenges the government’s profit structure. Do you think electronic money will be viable sooner or later down the road?

PG

ANSWER: Electronic currency is ALREADY the bulk of the money supply. When you deposit $100 in a bank, it lends out $90 from your deposit and your bank statement still reflects you have $100. However, the person who borrowed the money now has $90 in their account. The government did not “print” money to cover that extra $90, rather they just created “electronic” money.

So what is the big thing about cryptocurrencies? The idea is that it is money that will not depreciate and is strangely not “fiat.” Yet, it is no different than the electronic money created by the bank, which is also outside the strict domain of government.

If you just look at the price of Bitcoin, it demonstrates that this is merely a speculative boom indistinguishable from the Dot.COM Bubble, which also reflected a new era in technology. If Bitcoin was truly an alternative currency that was supposed to retain its value, the mere fact that the rice has soared like any stock proves that it is by no means a “store of wealth” that somehow is better than currency in which it must still be converted to use in the bulk of the economy.

If the power grid failed, everyone would be broke. You could not even buy food. Society would revert immediately back to barter. There are risks to any form of electronic money be it a bank or crypto. The government WILL move toward cryptocurrencies THAT THEY WILL CONTROL, not the private sector. I have stated before, they argue electronic money eliminates cash crime from bank robberies, drugs, prostitution, etc., but it introduces more sophisticated hacking computer crimes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

THE BLIND CONSPIRACY: The Gold Market Is Heading Towards A Big Fundamental Change

THE BLIND CONSPIRACY: The Gold Market Is Heading Towards A Big Fundamental Change

The gold market is heading towards a big fundamental change that few are prepared.  While many analysts in the alternative media community suggest that the gold price is manipulated due to Fed and Central bank intervention, there is another more obscure rationale that is the likely culprit.  I call it, “The Blind Conspiracy.”

But, before I get into the details of this Blind Conspiracy, there are a few very troubling developments in the alternative media community that I would like to discuss first.  The bulk of these concerns has to do with the increasing amount of faulty analysis and misinformation as well as the peddling of lousy conspiracy theories on the internet.

Why is this a big problem?  Because a lot of readers are being misguided as to the true nature of the serious predicament we are facing.  Half of the emails that I receive are from readers who are bringing up doubts based on other analysts’ faulty analysis and misinformation.  Thus, it takes a great deal of effort to provide the real facts and data to counteract the damage being done by certain individuals, even those with good intentions.

Furthermore, an increasing number of so-called precious metals analysts have switched over to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, believing that gold and silver will no longer function as monetary metals.  However, some of these analysts suggest that silver will still be valuable because it will be used as critical raw material in advanced products in our new HIGH-TECH WORLD.  I find this idea of a future modern high-tech world quite amusing when we can’t even maintain the failing complex infrastructure we are currently using.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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